Recipes, Stories, & Photographs from An Old Soul

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Inspiration

I spent my morning wandering the Bryn Mawr farmer’s market, enjoying sweet samples of farm-fresh fruit, lingering over the honey stand and drooling over homemade cheeses and lively green bunches of veggies. It was such a pleasant experience, and got my brain working about what ingredients I already had, what I could make, and what …

Is anyone else getting excited for the upcoming week? I know I am. I spent the morning at the market stocking up on vegetables, rice, fruit, and juice for the week. My refrigerator is completely stuffed. I’ve assembled recipes, steamed up a batch of rice, organized the pantry….and cooked myself an appropriate final brunch.

In preparation for this little project of mine (starting Monday!), I needed to do a little organizing. It’s usually my habit to scribble down recipes on whatever scraps of paper I can find, but luckily this time I have these adorable little notecards to record cleanse ideas (thank you, sweet Ryan!):

Armed with a template, I started with the recipes I jotted down during my last round of cleansing last year. Wait–where are they? Oh, that’s right, they’re in my storage unit. In Michigan. Crap. Onto scouring the internet…

In like a lion, they say. We’ll see about that. I’m still thinking about February. February always has a sort of finality to it, for me. It’s such a short month, and it’s the last one before my birthday, which falls on the last day of winter. So the second month of the year already …

Not much to say at this point, except it’s sad when anyone dies suddenly, especially when they have made some kind of impact on your life. Death can’t take her voice from us, luckily, or our memories of slow skating to “I Will Always Love You.” I remember watching the above video when I would ride the bus home from high school and sneak a few minutes in front of MTV. I can also honestly say that I tried my hardest to dress like her through college (that leather trenchcoat! that hair!). While in all honesty I certainly am not the world’s biggest Whitney Houston fan, I sure am a fan of music, and she recorded some great songs.

No recipe today, but instead a little reminiscing….Today in history, February 7, 1964, the Beatles arrived at JFK airport and inaugurated the most documented obsessed fan freakout that has spanned decades, generations, and oceans. My own father was a music writer at the time and, though he would argue you into the ground that The Beach Boys far outranked The Beatles in depth, style, and talent, was so inspired by the fan response that he decided to engage in a response of his own.

I love mornings like this. Diluted, soft light filtering in through the windows, hot coffee on the stove, no real obligations. It reminds me of waking up on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Sundays were not relaxing mornings–we had a rigorous chore schedule that had to be completed by noon (which included scrubbing the bathroom floors on our hands and knees) and there was the impending dread of doing all the homework I’d put off. Sundays were never fun days.